Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Big Data from Space (BiDS'19): Turning Data into Insights

Abstract

Big Data from Space refers to the massive spatio-temporal Earth and Space observation data collected by a variety of sensors - ranging from ground based to space-borne - and the synergy with data coming from other sources and communities. This domain is currently facing sharp development with numerous new initiatives and breakthroughs from intelligent sensors' networks to data science application. These developments are empowering new approaches and applications in various and diverse domains influencing life on earth and societal aspects, from sensing cities, monitoring human settlements and urban areas to climate change and security.

The goal of the Big Data from Space conference is to bring together researchers, engineers, developers, and users in the area of Big Data from Space. It is co-organised by ESA, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, and the European Union Satellite Centre (SatCen). The 2019 edition of the conference was hosted by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and held in the Alte Kongresshalle of Munich (Germany) from the 19th to the 21st of February 2019. These proceedings consist of a collection of 75 short papers accepted for oral or poster presentation at the conference as a result of the peer-review process by the conference programme committee. The papers are lined up around the topics matching the oral sessions as well as the poster session, also organised by topics. These contributions provide a snapshot of the current research activities, developments, and initiatives in Big Data from Space.

This 4th edition of the Big Data from Space conference is directed towards 'Turning Data into Insights'. Indeed, while the first editions of the conference concentrated on technologies and platforms capable of sustaining the sharp increase of data streams originating from space sensors, the development of efficient and effective methodologies and algorithms capable of extracting insights from these data is gradually becoming the main challenge. In this context, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques have started to play a key role as illustrated by numerous papers of this conference edition. Methodological developments are motivated by the pressing need to extract information on large areas and/or over long time series to better understand the dynamics of the processes that are shaping our planet and indeed our universe in the case of data collected by telescopes. The topic of analysis ready data has also emerged since the last edition and is closely linked with the development of new data cube representations. Big data from space is also introducing some new legal challenges and the need for further developments of standards and interoperable interfaces between the growing number of platforms hosting multi-petabyte scale data co-located with processing capabilities. All these topics as well as other generic key aspects of big data are mirrored in dedicated sections of these proceedings.

This publication is a Conference proceedings published by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service. It aims to provide evidence-based scientific support to the European policymaking process. The scientific output expressed does not imply a policy position of the European Commission. Neither the European Commission nor any person acting on behalf of the Commission is responsible for the use that might be made of this publication.